Nuno Ratola graduated in Chemical Engineering (1996) at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP, Portugal) and completed a Master in Environmental Engineering (2002) and a PhD degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering (2009) also at FEUP. Since obtaining his Chemical Engineering degree, which granted him a sense of practicality useful to this day, he had the opportunity to profit from a diverse number of experiences, mainly in an academic research environment, but also in industry. This was important to create synergies with people from several quadrants. With time came the specialisation in the field of environmental chemistry, focused on advanced analytical techniques and in the biomonitoring of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and emerging semi-volatile organic contaminants (SVOCs) in several environmental matrices, including the effects of climate change scenarios and health-related issues. The impact of emerging contaminants on coastal areas and on the production of energy from waste treatments and reuse of end-of-life materials under a circular economy framework are his most recent research interests. The outcome of Nuno Ratola’s wide-ranged professional experiences is reflected in 77 articles published in SCI journals, two books edited and 6 book chapters, accumulating over 2250 citations to yield an H-index of 30 (WoS). In addition, a total of 191 studies were presented in international conferences, including more than 50 oral presentations. He was PI or co-PI in 6 funded national and international projects and team member in 19 others (including MC and STSM in a COST action), is supervising 1 PhD student and supervised 2 Post-Docs, 6 visiting PhD students, 16 MSc thesis and 3 end-of-course projects. He is an editorial board member of Environment International (Elsevier; IF 11.8), a board member and former President of the Association for Chemistry and the Environment (ACE), and an evaluator of international projects in five countries. Since 2015 he also lectures Instrumental Methods of Analysis (MIA) in the Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering degrees at FEUP. In 2015 and 2016 he lectured Quality Management Systems to the same degrees. Along the way he had the opportunity to profit from more than 20 external residencies in several foreign top research institutions (including a Marie Curie action and a Visiting Professorship), building a network of collaborations which have been and still are fruitful. For example, with the Dep. of Environmental Chemistry of the CSIC (Barcelona, Spain), the Technical University of Crete (Chania, Greece), the Lancaster Environment Centre (UK), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the University of Murcia (Spain), the University Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain), the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), the University of La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain), the University of Florence (Italy), the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography (France), the National University of Cordoba (Argentina) or the Technical University Federico Santa María (Chile).